New Year's Resolution

I have finally decided on a good New Year’s Resolution for myself.

I am going to keep track of my personal savings spending. This is not really a budget. i might make that later. This is just a plan to keep track of all the money I spend daily. That includes things like my lunches, snacks, pencils and other stationary, and any other miscellaneous expenses.

My main motivation is to increase my willpower. This comes from the Willpowered website blog at where number seven says,

KEEP TRACK OF YOUR SPENDING I figure that this is an excellent way to tighten my willpower up a bit. There is also the curiosity factor. I am curious about how much I really am spending, though I don’t think it is that much. Then later, I might use this to make a budget but that is not my main intention.

I was teaching about new year’s resolutions to a student when I read this page quickly. It seemed like a good idea and simple. I like simple things.

At the same time, I want to study dual entry bookkeeping. I didn’t want to set up the whole system myself, and I found this great package that uses laravel. It is at firefly. The firefly system here was free and pretty comprehensive yet I did not need to try to hook up to my bank accounts… I don’t like that idea much. It also forces me to put in all the entries myself which is the willpower part. My resolution is to do it for one full year. After a year, I can abandon it or keep going as I see fit.

Another cool thing was it said I should run it on a TLS enabled site. I don’t have any certificates and wanted to experiment with them but I did not want to spend the money. I also don’t want to scare people away from any of my sites with self signed certificates.

On this site, I could set up https:// with my self signed certificate and not worry about other people panicking when they see the big warnings that it has. I have already set it up. Setting up https was actually a breeze!!

I used the guide for How to Create an SSL Certificate on Nginx for Ubuntu 14.04 and it was really easy. I finished it in just a matter of minutes. I really recommend this page if you want to do the same thing.

Let’s see if putting in all the daily entries will be so easy…